How Controlled Automation Helps Revenue Teams Do More

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the hospitality industry in a way that no other crisis has.

With the majority of hotel stock now closed or running on exceptionally low occupancies, it’s understandable that the unpredictable nature of the situation makes it feel like there’s little you can control. But recovery will come and how we approach that is something we can control. Now is the time to start planning ahead.

As revenue teams gear up for recovery, the focus will be on building conditional strategies that enable you to capture as much of the returning demand as possible, while staying close to your brand values and corporate commitments.

These strategies need to be agile and quick to implement and scale. Things will likely still change on a daily basis for quite some time. The challenge will be in finding the right rate(s) that enables you to sell the most rooms for the best return, as consumer confidence waxes and wanes.

When Automation Is Not The Answer

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic this was challenging. Now demand is at its most volatile, and your previous forecasts and strategies are rendered obsolete. What’s more, technology purporting to use AI and Machine Learning has proved useless due to the dramatic shift in demand year over year, with many hotels turning off all automation on their revenue management systems, because it might only have comp set data as its guide. Even in normal market conditions following your comp set means you might find yourself either racing to the bottom when market demand drops or playing catch-up in terms of rate gains.

However, turning off automation means everything reverts to manual operations at a time when reduced revenue teams are expected to navigate the most volatile and unpredictable demand markets they’ve ever encountered.

Senior executives are being called upon to increase efficiencies and maximize on any and all opportunities. DORMs are being rolled up to cluster positions, often with a portfolio of properties that operate across differing brands, segments or locations. And yet, it's exactly during these challenges that that you're suddenly forced to chose between efficiency and control. This is frustrating. How can both teams tackle the revenue opportunities of renewed demand effectively and efficiently while still maintaining full control of rates?

Putting You In Control

The answer is Controlled Automation. In a world of AI hype, and promises of “scientific” processes that cannot be fully understood, we believe that hoteliers deserve to feel in control rather than as if they are taking a ‘leap of faith’ to take advantage of efficiencies offered by automated processes.

We believe that automation is only good if revenue leaders hold the reins to control it. Controlled automation promotes conditional rate optimization, team efficiency and pulls on the talents and knowledge of your experts close to the market.

“With over 300 properties, it’s important that we’re able to deploy rate guidelines at scale to maintain strong brand standards and be compliant with our corporate commitments. We’re also always looking for ways to help our DORMs be more efficient. The Enterprise Rate Guidelines feature in Duetto’s GameChanger has been critical in helping us do both,” says Fernando Vives, Chief Commercial Officer, NH Hotel Group.

Duetto’s GameChanger is the only RMS in the world that offers efficiency and control while working within your unique revenue strategy parameters. It optimizes, but you remain firmly in the driving seat.

We accomplish this by continuing to invest in new features and functionality.

Game Changing Features

Our latest GameChanger features have been developed to enable revenue leaders to centralize control over their revenue strategy, while still empowering revenue teams with pricing flexibility within corporate or brand guidelines. Increasing efficiency and optimising revenue.

Min/Max bounds - You never have to worry about blindly following your competitors to the bottom as Min/Max bounds help you further control and safeguard automated price optimization. What’ more, looking at the roll-up of your min/max totals let’s you quickly see the true bounds of your pricing strategy.

Enterprise Rate Guidelines - This feature helps you set scalable strategies and roll them out across regions or entire portfolios in minutes.

The flexible setup allows you to create guidelines by brand, property type, or region.

You can change, add or remove guidelines at any time.

It’s the most efficient way to ensure alignment to your brand policy, while still allowing the team to implement local strategies at the property level.

Pricing Rules - These are essential and let you make the most of Duetto’s Open Pricing methodology, enabling you to truly tailor your strategy through room types, segmentation and other finer details. These influence the system so that your strategies remain consistent while pricing is automatically optimised in line with fluctuating market demand.

Stay Competitive

As hotel teams look to do more with less, now is not the time to find yourself stuck between using an automated system you don’t have full confidence in or reverting back to manual pricing calculations that are too slow to take advantage of revenue opportunities.

We want to help you build the most competitive strategies for your business, with a system that puts you in control while taking the legwork out of revenue management. Make sure you lead when recovery comes, don’t get stuck behind your comp set playing catch-up on rate.

Interested in learning more? Email us at hello@duettocloud.com and discover how you can begin to deploy your differentiated strategies safely and efficiently.